Madre

Madre

A woman

How many times we fled from the world,
How long they burned our hands:
Long we served the office
of giving birth, cooking dinner, raising beasts.

They relegated us to be trophies,
in the halls of important men.
We bit our tongues in the face of insults,
we stayed our fists, before the blow.

We resigned ourselves to cleaning the lowest of shelves,
And sucked up their malice in tears.
They gnawed on our bodies,
they left us naked,
in garbage cans, sidewalks and sugar cane fields.

We all were raped.
By the father, by the son, by the sons of their sons.
And no one said a damn thing.

In the depths of silence,
we mended our wounds.
Our heart was a suture
that always ripped open,
again and again.

In the darkest of nights they would burn our wings.

We collected herbs, brewed concoctions,
to heal those who would betray us.
They found us performing our love in the fire,
we raised our voices and they thought us crazy
and burned us as witches and deviants at the stake.

It was all the men, legitimate sons of God.

Ashes upon ashes,
we were one with the breath of the wind.
They erased our names from encyclopedias
they ignored our footsteps in newspapers
they kept our remains in wide cemeteries
where there never was a grave,
a name,
a woman.

 -Translation